ZBT launches rocket at Harvard-Yale game

By Katherine Shim

With eight minutes and 56 seconds remaining in the third quarter of
the traditional Harvard-Yale football game last Saturday, a rocket erupted
from the sod at the zero-yard line, shooting over the goal post an 81/2 by
31/2 foot banner with the letters "MIT" on both sides.

Police spent several minutes tugging at the banner, trying to take it
down from the goal posts.

"We put a mechanism in the ground at approximately the zero-yard line
with a rocket engine that shoots a banner over the horizontal bar of the
goal post," said Tipirneni. "The mechanism was activated by about 480 feet
of wire that ran underneath the field and connected with two metal
bleachers of the stadium."

The wires ran under the sleeves of Heafitz, who detonated the rocket at
an "appropriate time" with the battery pack he carried in the inner pocket
of his jacket. The rocket was set off just as Yale prepared to score a
field goal, which sailed wide.

Design of the hack began in September, Tipirneni said. "The whole thing
was tested at a local high school early in the fall, but because of the
amount of work that goes into laying a wire into a hole three feet deep and
three inches wide in diameter,

we decided to go right ahead and put everything in place at the Harvard
stadium," he continued.

The group encountered a setback in mid-October, when either the Harvard
Campus Police or the Harvard grounds crew discovered the wires and removed
the entire apparatus from the ground. To better conceal the hole, the trio
was forced to use butter knives when laying down the wire.

Harvard policeguarded the stadium

The vigilant watch of the Harvard police made preparation for the hack
extremely difficult, according to Tipirneni.

"Getting into the stadium itself was really hard," he said. "Especially
in the weeks right before the game. The police were guarding the stadium
all night.

"We had to get the timing just right between their shifts," Tipirneni
explained. "Getting in basically involved one of us climbing over a fence
with spikes, crawling through a hole in a fence, and running through the
stadium, radioing to the others if the coast was clear."

"After the cops found the wires in the field, the stadium was kept open
at one end, guarded by a row of police cars with their headlights on," he
added.

In the days before the game, the group took care to not leave any
footprints on the field, and the entire apparatus was tested in a
"particularly elegant" manner, Tipirneni said. "We turned the wires on, and
placed a multimeter between the two metal bleachers, completing a circuit."

"Then we checked for the resistance between the two bleachers," Tipirneni
continued. "If the multimeter read 3 ohms, we knew that we were okay. We
never had to actually go onto the field in order to test the system."

Tipirneni estimated the costs of the entire hack to be about $300 per
person.

Similar hack attempted

at Yale last year

ZBT attempted a similar hack at the Harvard-Yale game last year in
New Haven. The hack would have involved four MIT banners erupting near a
goal post via four rockets run by timers.

The hack fizzled, however, when one rocket detonated 12 hours too early,
and campus police, startled by the explosion, found two of the three
remaining rockets. The one surviving rocket did detonate during the game,
but did not attract much attention.

"Part of our failure last year had to do with the fact that too many
people were involved in it," Tipirneni said. "Last year, it was an effort
of the whole fraternity. People were telling other people about it. This
year, the hack was basically kept a secret between the three of us."

The last successful hack of a Harvard-Yale game took place in 1982. The
members of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity set up a large weather balloon
that rose from the turf near the 46-yard line during a break following a
touchdown in the first quarter. The balloon, which had "MIT" written all
over it, inflated to six feet in diameter before bursting.

In 1978, the Yale grounds crew discovered a remote-control spray paint
apparatus that would have painted the letters "MIT" onto the turf. Also, in
1948, a primer cord used to ignite dynamite was found beneath the turf of
the Harvard football field. The cord would have burned a large "MIT" onto
the ground.